Garden Design as Urban Planning: The Case of Roberto Burle Marx

Roberto Burle Marx is often associated with his abundantly varied designs for gardens in private residences in Brazil, Venezuela, and beyond. This paper examines instances of his work as integrally related to urban planning, “progress,” and municipal modernization projects in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Building on my experience as curator of the exhibition “The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx” at the New York Botanical Garden (summer 2019), I interrogate the phenomenon of the garden not as a tranquil oasis in an urban setting but as an inexorable link within the chain of development of rapidly evolving metropolises in the mid-twentieth century. Although RBM’s career as garden architect in the public sphere began in Recife in the 1930s, it was with his collaboration with Oscar Niemeyer on the Ministry of Health and Education building (Rio, completed 1943) that his designs provoked the public’s realization of the garden’s necessary role within the over-all structure. On a much grander scale, Rio’s Aterro do Flamengo Park (completed 1965), stretching from Santos Dumont Airport to Copacabana marked a new high point in the integration of the garden as “within” as opposed to “outside” the physical and psychological framework of the urban fabric. In São Paulo, what was originally conceived as a private garden for the Pignatari family became the core of a vast swath of the central city known as the Parque Burle Marx. This “inside-outside” dichotomy serves as the crux of this examination.